Oracle Blog

Sr. Program Manager, OpenSolaris Engineering, Sun Microsystems

Open Source from a Company Perspective

As OpenSolaris gains in popularity, we are finding ourselves back in
the spotlight. That's fine. This stuff comes and goes. For a long while
we were pretty much ignored, but I have a feeling that things will be
hot for a while with the upcoming release of the OpenSolaris distro.
That's ok, too. It's all part of building a business and a new
development community -- and figuring out how the two mix since they
both grow from the same sponsor. And that's the key. Sun is the company
and Sun is opening Solaris, and Sun is also the primary builder of the
OpenSolaris community in these early stages. Matt Asay brings this up
-- The difficulty of building community around commercial: The OpenSolaris example -- based on some posts he links to from Ted T'so' What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris. I commented on both blogs and also tried to start a conversation on advocacy-discuss -- Corporate Open Source -- so we can discuss some of these bits here in our community. I also think we need to address some of these issues in the Advocacy discussion at the OpenSolaris Summit
next week -- not the specifics of any given blog, obviously, but the
larger issues of how we grow and how we get our story out there so it's
considered along with everyone else's. I don't particularly care about
spin and noise in this particular context, but rather, I'm interested
in specific programs we can initiate in the Advocacy CG
to actually help build a global community that thrives across language,
cultural, and geographic barriers and one that is empowered to
contribute back. Once we do that, much of the story will take care of
itself. In other words, the work has to come first so the story
resonates as true.